The fine print

There’s pretty nature. The trees are starting to turn. Some of the bushes, too.

An excitement that’s impossible to explain until experiencing it — our first few weeks here we didn’t have garbage or recycling service. It’s stressful to constantly be packing up boxes and moving boxes and re-moving boxes and re-re-moving them after changing your mind for the 19th time about whether that corner room will be a dining room or an office. Materials are always piling up, especially since moving from our old apartment to our new house also means emptying out a storage unit that’s been filled and forgotten for a year. Stress piles up. On top of all this, having garbage and recycling pile up feels menacing. Then one day some dude shows up and suddenly you have giant bins to put all that stuff in. The first morning I went to the curb and opened the bins — our bins — to see they’d been emptied I could have kissed them…if they weren’t garbage bins.

The new house is the big headline. I understand on an abstract level that the fine print is yet to come. “You don’t own your house,” my father told me a few months ago. “Your house owns you.” Something in the basement leaked already. The honeymoon phase will end, at some point.

But for me, having lived in or on 15 studios, apartments, rentals and couches, having concluded I’d never be one of those people who lived in a house — their house — the honeymoon seems so big and so shiny I can’t imagine ever not feeling illuminated.